The new exhibition in Cambridge University Library, ‘Shelf Lives: Four Centuries of Collectors & their Books’, is a treat for anyone who wants to know more about how a great collection came together. Focusing on ten bibliomaniacs with enormously varied interests, spanning the globe and vast tracts of human inquiry, it blows the dust from some well-known treasures and a host of unknown gems. And it’s free, and open to all.
Today the UL, a copyright library, has more than 8 million items on its shelves. The exhibition begins by taking us back to 1557, when its collection had dwindled to just 200 books, which could be itemized on just a few pages of ‘Grace Book Δ’. The first collector singled out for attention is Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon, and rescuer of numerous important manuscripts from the ruins of the dissolved monasteries. Parker donated 100 volumes to the library shortly before his death in 1574, and several of them are on display here—including an Anglo-Saxon gospel and a book of homilies, both penned c. 1050.
A few paces to the right is a manuscript that is strikingly different and yet really the same–a text of St Matthew’s Gospel in Persian, dating from the early eighteenth century. This was acquired by George Lewis, Chaplain to the East India Company, who was based in Madras from 1692-1714. His collection came to the University Library in a wooden cabinet labelled ‘Bibliotheca Orientalis’, and along with the seventy-six manuscripts it contained a number of beguiling objects, including a magnificent pair of embroidered slippers and a set of Indian playing cards on wood and tortoiseshell. One wonders what other weird and wonderful things are hidden away on the library’s shelves…
The changes keep ringing. From India, we head to China, and the collection made by a diplomat, Sir Thomas Wade. Wade gave 4304 Chinese books to the UL in 1886; one of them displayed here is open at a delicious picture of an exhausted student, lying asleep and dreaming of passing his exams. In the dream, this involves being anointed by a dragon-headed examination god. Then Haydn, and Marion Margaret Scott’s collection of scores, portraits and curios associated with the composer. Next Montaigne, and Gilbert de Botton’s recently-acquired library, which includes copies of the Essais owned by Napoleon and Ben Jonson, as well as the copy of Lucretius’s poem De Rerum Natura that Montaigne annotated in his tower in the Dordogne. And so it goes on, with manuscripts of John Donne, Virginia Woolf and Rupert Brooke; first-world-war ephemera, including trench money printed by the Austrians in Italy; a volume embroidered for Elizabeth I; and the celebrated Book of Cerne, a prayer book written c. 820-840 AD.
Working in a library like the CUL, you get scattered glimpses of the people who brought the books together—in bookplates, names scribbled on flyleaves, or the call-numbers of the books themselves, which often point to particular collections. It’s nice to be able to put names to faces at last. More importantly, though, as more and more books become available in ‘disembodied’, digitized form, it’s increasingly crucial to recognize how much history is embodied in our libraries—in the processes that have brought them together, often through the violent destruction of earlier collections. Research libraries need the resources—financial and conceptual—to start understanding what they’ve got in new ways. That’s why an exhibition like this really matters.